"view with which Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible agrees, as does the People's New Testament, while Clarke's Commentary on the Bible remarks that one manuscripts gives, in place of ""the faith"", ""the resurrection of the dead, which is one of the greatest mysteries of the faith. Floyd H. Barackman says that in this passage ""the faith"" refers to the whole of the New Testament. Arthur Edward Waite wrote that in the Zohar, which is the foundational work of the Jewish Kabbalah, there lie embedded fragments of a mystical work, Sepher ha-bahir, an anonymous work of Jewish mysticism, attributed to"
"the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism. ""Yetzirah"" is more literally translated as ""Formation""; the word ""Briah"" is used for ""Creation"". The Zohar was originally considered to be a revelation from God through R. Simeon ben Yohai, though it was most likely written by Moses de Leon of Spain in the 13th century. The text uses large amounts of gematria to interpret the Torah text. The method of gematria involves numeric values assigned to Hebrew letters, giving every word a value, allowing one to look for patterns in the text based on those numerical values. According to the Zohar, gematria"
"more so. The creative power of letters is particularly evident in ""Sefer Yetzirah"" (Hebrew: book of creation), a mystical text that tells a story of the creation which is based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a story which diverges greatly from that in the Book of Genesis. The creative power of letters is also explored in the Talmud and Zohar. In Kabbalah, every Shmita corresponds to individual emotional sephirot (the lower seven ""sephirot"" from ""Chessed"" to ""Malchut"", named ""middot""). 13th-century scholar Nahmanides asserted that the Torah could be read differently through different pronunciation and word divisions. Building on"
"Sefer Yetzirah Sefer Yetzirah ( ""Sēpher Yəṣîrâh"", ""Book of Formation"", or ""Book of Creation"") is the title of the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism, although some early commentators treated it as a treatise on mathematical and linguistic theory as opposed to Kabbalah. ""Yetzirah"" is more literally translated as ""Formation""; the word ""Briah"" is used for ""Creation"". The book is traditionally ascribed to the patriarch Abraham, although others attribute its writing to Rabbi Akiva. Modern scholars have not reached consensus on the question of its origins. According to Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the objective of the book's author was to convey"
"(""Splendor"") – the most important text of Kabbalah, at times achieving even canonical status as part of Oral Torah. It is a mystical commentary on the Torah, written in medieval Aramaic. Gershom Scholem argued that Moses de León was the sole author of the Zohar. More recently, Yehuda Liebes contended that while De León may have been the primary author, he incorporated or recast selections from contemporary kabbalists (e.g. Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, Rabbi Joseph of Hamadan, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher). Most recently, Kabbalah scholars such as Ronit Meroz, Daniel Abrams and Boaz Huss have been demonstrating that the materials within"
"book should be erased and all mention of its existence deleted. While throughout the era of merkabah mysticism the problem of creation was not of paramount importance, the treatise ""Sefer Yetzirah"" (""Book of Creation"") represents an attempted cosmogony from within a merkabah milieu. This text was probably composed during the seventh century, and evidence suggests Neoplatonic, Pythagoric, and Stoic influences. It features a linguistic theory of creation in which God creates the universe by combining the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, along with emanations represented by the ten numerals, or ""sefirot"". Moshe Idel, Gershom Scholem, Joseph Dan, and others"
"book called ""The Anatomy of The Body of God"" has written interpretations of this book in Thelema. The Quran speaks of a holy book by the name of the Scrolls of Abraham which translates to the scrolls of Abraham. Although most Muslims believe this book to have long perished it is speculated that this may be a reference to ""Sefer Yetzirah"" as Jewish tradition generally ascribes authorship of that book to Abraham. Sefer Yetzirah Sefer Yetzirah ( ""Sēpher Yəṣîrâh"", ""Book of Formation"", or ""Book of Creation"") is the title of the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism, although some early"
"C.E. Scholem also writes on other tracts like ""Shiur Koma"", the ""Book of Enoch"", ""Sefer Yetzira"" and the ""Sefer Habahir"". In the book, Scholem, citing other scholars, observed similarities between the ""Sefer Yetzirah"" (Book of Creation) and early Islamic gnosticism. Scholem subsequently explores the works of the German Jewish school of Hasidim, and of the works of Abraham Abulafia. Next, the most detailed investigation in Scholem's work is on the best known work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar. After that, Scholem explores Isaac Luria's teachings and the Eastern European Hasidic movement. On the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, a"
"until their redaction by Shimon bar Yochai, modern academic analysis of the Zohar, such as that by the 20th century religious historian Gershom Scholem, has theorized that de León was the actual author. The view of some Orthodox Jews and Orthodox groups, as well as non-Orthodox Jewish denominations, generally conforms to this latter view, and as such, most such groups have long viewed the Zohar as pseudepigraphy and apocrypha, while sometimes accepting that its contents may have meaning for modern Judaism. Jewish prayerbooks edited by non-Orthodox Jews may therefore contain excerpts from the Zohar and other kabbalistic works, even if"
"the Zohar underwent several generations of writing, re-writing and redaction. De León claimed to discover the text of the Zohar while in the land of Israel and attributed it to the 2nd-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, who is the main character of the text. The text gained enormous popularity throughout the Jewish world. Though the book was widely accepted, a small number of significant rabbis over the subsequent centuries published texts declaring Rabbi Moshe invented it as a forgery with concepts contrary to Judaism. However, many of these Rabbis were not Kabbalists themselves. This was a major point of contention"
"forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism. Jewish Kabbalists originally developed their own transmission of sacred texts within the realm of Jewish tradition, and often use classical Jewish scriptures to explain and demonstrate its mystical teachings. These teachings are held by followers in Judaism to define the inner meaning of both the Hebrew Bible and traditional rabbinic literature and their formerly concealed transmitted dimension, as well as to explain the significance of Jewish religious observances. One of the fundamental kabbalistic texts, the ""Zohar"", was first published in the 13th century, and the almost universal form adhered to in"
"being used by Naḥmanides for Kabbalistic purposes). The ""Sefer Yetzirah"" exists in multiple versions, including: The differences among these versions tend to be minor. The ""Sefer Yetzirah"" is devoted to speculations concerning God's creation of the world. The ascription of its authorship to the biblical patriarch Abraham shows the high esteem which it enjoyed for centuries. It may even be said that this work had a greater influence on the development of the Jewish mind than almost any other book after the completion of the Talmud. The ""Sefer Yetzirah"" is exceedingly difficult to understand on account of its obscure style."
"for metempsychosis of souls: literally ""soul cycle"", plural """"gilgulim""""). The Zohar and the Sefer HaBahir specifically discuss reincarnation. It is a common belief in contemporary Hasidic Judaism, which regards the Kabbalah as sacred and authoritative, though understood in light of a more innate psychological mysticism. Kabbalah also teaches that ""The soul of Moses is reincarnated in every generation."" Other, Non-Hasidic, Orthodox Jewish groups while not placing a heavy emphasis on reincarnation, do acknowledge it as a valid teaching. Its popularization entered modern secular Yiddish literature and folk motif. The 16th century mystical renaissance in communal Safed replaced scholastic Rationalism as"
"The difficulty is rendered still greater by the lack of a critical edition, the present text being much interpolated and altered. Hence there is a wide divergence of opinion regarding the age, origin, contents, and value of the book. ""Sefer Yetzirah"" describes how the universe was created by the ""God of Israel"" (a list of all of God's Hebrew names appears in the first sentence of the book) through ""32 wondrous ways of wisdom"": These divisions correspond to Jewish concepts such as the 3 letters making up God's name (""yud"", ""he"", and ""vav""), the 7 days of the Jewish week,"
"Its scriptural exegesis can be considered an esoteric form of the Rabbinic literature known as Midrash, which elaborates on the Torah. The Zohar is mostly written in what has been described as a cryptic, obscure style of Aramaic. Aramaic, the day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BCE – 70 CE), was the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud. The Zohar first appeared in Spain in the 13th century, and was published by a Jewish writer named Moses de León. De León"
"letters ""came with the Israelites from Ashur [Assyria]""); others attribute mystical significance to the letters, connecting them with the process of creation or the redemption. In mystical conceptions, the alphabet is considered eternal, pre-existent to the Earth, and the letters themselves are seen as having holiness and power, sometimes to such an extent that several stories from the Talmud illustrate the idea that they cannot be destroyed. The idea of the letters' creative power finds its greatest vehicle in the Sefer Yezirah, or ""Book of Creation"", a mystical text of uncertain origin which describes a story of creation highly divergent"
"company to emphasize the visual appeal of the books. ArtScroll publishes books on a variety of Jewish subjects. The best known is probably an annotated Hebrew-English ""siddur"" (""prayerbook"") (""The ArtScroll Siddur""). In recent years, its Torah translation and commentary, a series of translations and commentaries on books of the Tanach (Hebrew Bible), and an English translation and elucidation of the Babylonian Talmud have enjoyed great success. Other publications include works on Jewish Law, novels and factual works based on Jewish life or history, and cookbooks. Mesorah Publications received widespread acclaim in response to its ArtScroll line of prayerbooks, starting with"
"ancient figures, but were never printed and made publicly available until the time of the Zohar's medieval publication. The greatest acceptance of this sequence of events is held within Haredi Judaism, especially Chasidic groups. R' Yechiel Michel Epstein (d.1908), and R' Yisrael Meir Kagan (d.1933) both believed in the authenticity of the Zohar. Rabbis Eliyahu Dessler (d.1953) and Gedaliah Nadel (d.2004) maintained that it is acceptable to believe that the Zohar was not written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and that it had a late authorship. Some claim the tradition that Rabbi Shimon wrote that the concealment of the Zohar"
"Siddur, Yetzira, and other Rabbinic texts. ""Sefer Raziel HaMalakh"" (רזיאל המלאך) (Book of Raziel the Angel) is a collection of esoteric writings, probably compiled and edited by the same hand, but originally not the work of one author. Leopold Zunz (""G. V."" 2d ed., p. 176) distinguishes three main parts: (1) the Book Ha-Malbush; (2) the Great Raziel; (3) the Book of Secrets, or the Book of Noah. These three parts are still distinguishable—2b–7a, 7b–33b, 34a and b. After these follow two shorter parts entitled ""Creation"" and ""Shi'ur Ḳomah,"" and after 41a come formulas for amulets and incantations. Zohar (זהר)"
"its articles. Some in Modern Orthodox Judaism reject the above view as naive. Some Orthodox Jews accept the earlier rabbinic position that the Zohar was a work written in the Middle Medieval Period by Moses de León, but argue that since it is obviously based on earlier materials, it can still be held to be authentic, but not as authoritative or without error as others within Orthodoxy might hold. Jews in non-Orthodox Jewish denominations accept the conclusions of historical academic studies on the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts. As such, most non-Orthodox Jews have long viewed the Zohar as pseudepigraphy"
"mystical literature, the first being the Apocalyptic literature of the second and first pre-Christian centuries and which contained elements that carried over to later kabbalah. Throughout the centuries since, many texts have been produced, among them the ancient descriptions of ""Sefer Yetzirah"", the ""Heichalot"" mystical ascent literature, the ""Bahir"", ""Sefer Raziel HaMalakh"" and the ""Zohar"", the main text of Kabbalistic exegesis. Classic mystical Bible commentaries are included in fuller versions of the ""Mikraot Gedolot"" (Main Commentators). Cordoveran systemisation is presented in ""Pardes Rimonim"", philosophical articulation in the works of the Maharal, and Lurianic rectification in ""Etz Chayim"". Subsequent interpretation of"
"Sephardic figures, epitomized by Moshe ben Maimon, Maimonides (Rambam) (1135–1204). As a precursor to the great western transformations, the ""Book of the Zohar"" (""Séfer ha-zójhar"" or ""The Book of Splendor"") by Moses de Leon is crucial for understanding this decisive shift. Another great political thinker who defended and protected lethargy in a world that is overwhelmingly vigilant was Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), with his ""Studies on Hysteria"" (1895) and ""The Interpretation of Dreams"" (1899). In his maturity, Freud turned towards the Mediterranean and towards Sepharad, as did Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. Freud understood the public roots of human pain as"
"Mark Lidzbarski and Michael Lodahl have also hypothesized existence of an Arabian Jewish sect whose veneration of Ezra bordered on deification. The 1906 ""Jewish Encyclopedia"" states: ""In the Koran (ix. 30) the Jews are charged with worshiping Ezra (""'Uzair"") as the son of God—a malevolent metaphor for the great respect which was paid by the Jews to the memory of Ezra as the restorer of the Law, and from which the Ezra legends of apocryphal literature (II Esd. xxxiv. 37-49) originated (as to how they developed in Mohammedan legends see Damiri, ""Ḥayat al-Ḥayawan,"" i. 304-305). It is hard to bring"
"work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, is quoted liberally in all Jewish learning; in the Zohar the idea of reincarnation is mentioned repeatedly. Trugman states that in the last five centuries the concept of reincarnation, which until then had been a much hidden tradition within Judaism, was given open exposure. Shraga Simmons commented that within the Bible itself, the idea [of reincarnation] is intimated in Deut. 25:5–10, Deut. 33:6 and Isaiah 22:14, 65:6. Yirmiyahu Ullman wrote that reincarnation is an ""ancient, mainstream belief in Judaism"". The Zohar makes frequent and lengthy references to reincarnation. Onkelos, a righteous convert and authoritative"
"mystics in the Ancient World, among whom differing explanations were given of the after-life, although with a universal belief in an immortal soul. Today, reincarnation is an esoteric belief within many streams of modern Judaism. Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), teaches a belief in gilgul, transmigration of souls, and hence the belief in reincarnation is universal in Hasidic Judaism, which regards the Kabbalah as sacred and authoritative, and is also held as an esoteric belief within Modern Orthodox Judaism. In Judaism, the Zohar, first published in the 13th century, discusses reincarnation at length, especially in the Torah portion ""Balak."" The most comprehensive"
"ancient writings. It offers a cosmogony based upon the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and connected with Jewish chronology and Messianology, while at the same time insisting upon the heptad (7) as the holy number, rather than upon the decadic (10) system adopted by the later haggadists and observable in the ""Sefer Yetzirah"". The Pythagorean idea of the creative powers of numbers and letters was shared with ""Sefer Yetzirah"" and was known in the time of the Mishnah before 200 CE. Early elements of Jewish mysticism can be found in the non-Biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such"
"Kabbalah does not employ the terminology or labels of non-Jewish Gnosticism, but grounds the same or similar concepts in the language of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The 13th-century Zohar (""Splendor""), a foundational text in Kabbalah, is written in the style of a Jewish Aramaic Midrash, clarifying the five books of the Torah with a new Kabbalistic system that uses completely Jewish terms. The Mandaeans are an ancient Gnostic sect that have survived to this day and are found today in Iraq. Their namesake owes to their following John the Baptist and in that country,"
"of the period addressed individual ""sephirot"" in some of their prayers, although the practice was apparently uncommon. Apologists explain that Jews may have been praying ""for"" and not necessarily ""to"" the aspects of Godliness represented by the ""sephirot"". Yaakov Emden, 1697–1776, wrote the ""Mitpaḥath Sfarim"" (""Veil of the Books""), a detailed critique of the Zohar in which he concludes that certain parts of the Zohar contain heretical teaching and therefore could not have been written by Shimon bar Yochai. Yiḥyeh Qafeḥ, a 20th-century Yemenite Jewish leader and Chief Rabbi of Yemen, spearheaded the Dor Deah (""generation of knowledge"") movement to"
"Shekinah, or ""presence"", as children of the True God, and most popularly the ten Sephiroth as schema of the universe between Israel and Jehovah. It did this by interpreting the concrete ethics of the scripture rather than, say, the universal parable more evident in the gospels. Through the darker centuries, it became popular with occultists like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Pico della Mirandola and Eliphas Levi before being formalised in popular new-age magic. ""Gematria"" was extrapolated from ""The Equinox"" vol. 1, no.5 where it was originally titled ""The First Key of Solomon the King continued"" being the fifth in that series."
"viewed in this system as products of the combination and permutation of these mystic characters, and such a use of the letters by the Jews for the formation of the Holy Name for thaumaturgical purposes is attested by magic papyri that quote an ""Angelic Book of Moses,"" which was full of allusions to biblical names. The linguistic theories of the author of the ""Sefer Yetzirah"" are an integral component of its philosophy, its other parts being astrological and Gnostic cosmogony. The three letters Aleph, Mem, Shin, are not only the three ""mothers"" from which the other letters of the alphabet"
"ascribed the work to Shimon bar Yochai (""Rashbi""), a rabbi of the 2nd century during the Roman persecution who, according to Jewish legend, hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah and was inspired by the Prophet Elijah to write the Zohar. This accords with the traditional claim by adherents that Kabbalah is the concealed part of the Oral Torah. While the traditional majority view in religious Judaism has been that the teachings of Kabbalah (lit. ""tradition"") were revealed by God to Biblical figures such as Abraham and Moses and were then transmitted orally from the Biblical era"
"could be seen as either continuations of or breaks from the canon of Rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, and resulted in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods. Rabbinic literature sometimes views Abraham as a philosopher. Some have suggested that Abraham introduced a philosophy learned from Melchizedek; Some Jews ascribe the ""Sefer Yetzirah"" ""Book of Creation"" to Abraham. A midrash describes how Abraham understood this world to have a creator and director by comparing this world to ""a house with a light in it"", what is now called"
"counteract the influence of the Zohar and modern Kabbalah. He authored critiques of mysticism in general and ""Lurianic Kabbalah"" in particular; his magnum opus was Milḥamoth ha-Shem (""Wars of Hashem"") against what he perceived as neo-platonic and gnostic influences on Judaism with the publication and distribution of the Zohar since the 13th Century. Rabbi Yiḥyah founded yeshivot, rabbinical schools, and synagogues that featured a rationalist approach to Judaism based on the Talmud and works of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides (Rambam). Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994), an ultra-rationalist Modern Orthodox philosopher and brother of Nechama Leibowitz, publicly shared views expressed in Yiḥyeh Qafeḥ's"